update on smasher

After my euphoria from installing smasher without any problems I had some time to try out this very nice audio toy. It comes with some help, although it won’t explain everything. However, one easiely recognizes what is going on. What I didn’t realize before installing it was that smasher is not (hopefully yet) designed for live usage. So one can not synchronize playback with other programs (at least I didn’t know how to) and I couldn’t change slicing during playback. When smasher choked on something one cannot reconnect to the jack server. Alltogether it’s a very nice piece of software. One can prepare great loops with nice effects and save them to a wav. Thank you developers.

I have to add another note to my former post. When I installed it on my second machine, running as well on Ubuntu 8.04, it didn’t want to work straight away. On startup smasher  said:

smasher: /usr/lib/libwx_gtk2u_aui-2.8.so.0: \
        version `WXU_2.8.9' not found (required by smasher)

It turned out that some updates from this library are not included in Ubuntu. Adding apt.wxwidgets.org to the package sources list (see) lets you update to the needed version from the wxwidget developers page.

Smasher, an open source beat-slicer

For a time now I was looking for an open source beat-slicer. I came across Smasher reading Dave Phillips’ latest article on linuxjournal.com, always a good read by the way. As he does a review on it in his article and I just installed it ten minutes ago, I will not bother you by another review.

As he points out, Smasher needs a variety of libraries to be built. Trying to compile it, I bumped into an error in wrapsound.cpp a few times, until I realized that from the same sourceforge page one can download a package smasher-1.1.6-ubuntu_i386.deb. It worked without problems for me on Ubuntu 8.04.

Then I started up Smasher and to my full delight it played the example file back as well straight to alsa as through a jack-server. So I’m quite excited about trying it out…

snapshot from smasher.sourceforge.net

using audacity

Audacity is a free program, no need to give your email to anyone. Better download directly from its home on sourceforge!

It’s a well known program with GPLicense for recording and editing sounds. There is plenty of links on the internet on how to use it. However, it always takes some time to find the answer to special questions so I will document here on my experiences.

basic recording

I run Audacity using jack. To hear my source (e.g. MiniDisc) although I’m not running anything else I connect system-in and system-out directly. I switch  to Audacity and use a new empty project. When the record button is pressed (or key “r”) Audacity automatically sets up two jack audio input channels and reads system-in. The level meter goes with the flow and blue lines on the meter mark the highest peak of  the recording. One easily sees if the signal level was too high.

Then most probably one wants to save the recording. New name and so on…

editing

… saved. From now on, when I change my project, I can save it under the given name with CTRL+S. Nothing unusual so far. Funnily one can provoke  a rather strange “error” here, which confused me for quite a while. Sometimes it says: “Disallowed for some reason.  Try selecting some Audio first?” You maybe think about it and press OK, then you think you’d better save it again and the same message comes up. What it actually wants to say is: “There were no changes made to save. So I cannot do what you asked me for”. One can see, that the save entry in the file menu is disabled!

Saving a project leaves a file called project.aup and a directory with the name project_data.

listening

SPACE starts playback always at the marker (fine black line, NOT where the cursor is) and SPACE stops it again. A new playback will start at the marker and not where you stopped it. The marker can be set by clicking with the selection tool (F1) into the sample. When you mark a region by dragging the mouse-click along the sample, playback stops at the left end. SHIFT+SPACE will start looping playback on the selected region. The marker can be moved a little with the LEFT and RIGHT keys, it jumps to the beginning with HOME and to the END.

Audacity: The selection tool is for marking ranges or moving the marker line. The blue lines in the audio level meter show the highest peaks during the last playback.

jack-rack open/save dialog hangs

It seems that the binary packages of jack-rack (an effect rack for jack) of some (ubuntu) distributions are compiled without a certain library. If this is the case one can not save or load the jack-rack presets, a rather annoying feature. In the discussions of ubuntu bugs site launchpad I found the solution. It says: “In order for this thing to work, Jack Rack has to be compiled with libgnomeui-dev installed in the system. …”

m-audio axiom 25 and linux

This is a short message  informing that I plugged a M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI controller into the USB port and it was recognised immediately. Sooperlooper, Specimen, JackRack, Hydrogen… perfect. I didn’t yet figure out how the transport buttons work.  The manual is telling me weird stuff…

(as of Ubuntu 8.04, 2.6.24-23-rt)

Photo of the M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI controller.

using sound effects in ardour

To use LADSPA effects in ARDOUR projects one can just add one from the list by double-clicking in the field above the volume control in the mixer panel. But sometimes you want to use the same effect on different tracks or mix the original with the effect. If there is no Dry/Wet-mix control in the effect plug-in the latter can be done via SEND-effects. Adding the same effect to different tracks through a SEND plug-in, CPU usage is smaller than adding it to every single track. Although, once you know how it works it is quite straightforward, but I struggled a lot getting it to work.

To do so one adds a bus to the mixer panel. Then a SEND plugin is chosen by right-clicking in the effect field of the desired audio track. This plug-in can be attached to another track or bus  where one can add effects in the usual way. The important trick which finally does the job and which took  me a while to figure out is to activate the SEND connection by right-clicking on it. In the menu you find a activate command.

From now on all pre-fader signals from the chosen track go into the chosen bus where effects can be added. Pre fader means that you can change the volume of the original track (or even turn it down to mute) and he signal is still received by the effect bus. If the SEND is added into the field below the volume control it is a post fader send and the signal goes to the effect bus filtered.

The picture shows the mixer panel with an actived SEND plugin (pre-fader) in an audio track. The levels of Bus 3 show that the signal is received.

Sound Transit – a different kind of sound database

A few months ago I already posted links to some sound databases on the internet. This time I want to present you another place which has – apart from the recordings -  a very nice feature to explore them. But one after the other.

soundtransit.nl

Rather than just sounds of opening doors or dogs making love, soundtransit.nl collects field recordings from around the world “with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives”. The user is invited to upload their files and one can search and download everything under a Creative Commons-license.

What makes this site special in my opinion is the part where you can book sound transits: Since the recordings are filed with the place where they were taken you can enter two locations and a number of stops in between. As a result a mix of  corresponding sounds is generated and can be heard or downloaded. One example I like very much is a journey from Berlin (Germany) to Palma de Mallorca (Spain), via Egypt, India and Albania.

compiling sooperlooper

I recently downloaded the newest sources of sooperlooper (1.6.13). Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a version from 2005 (1.0.8), which actually surprised me a bit. Compiling the sources is not a big deal, but ubuntu users will not find one of the packages from the build requirements in the standard repositories: Rubberband.

To compile rubberband you will need another package, fftw-3. This, in turn, requires vamp-sdk. Downloading and compiling from bottom to top you should be able to compile sooperlooper, all other packages (and their package-dev counterparts!) are found in the repositories.

sooperlooper segmentation fault

I wrote before, that I couldn’t get sooperlooper started. It turned out to be a problem which has nothing to do with sooperlooper. Because the sooperlooper server runs up fine but the GUI cannot connect to it. Filling in the right data for host name etc. and reconnecting, the GUI quits with a segmentatioin fault.

I found out that my hosts were not resolved correctly, apparently after changing my hostname the wrong way. So I changed the second line of file /etc/hosts so that it reads:
127.0.1.1 myCorrectHostname
It was wrong before and after that sooperlooper works fine!

By the way: I could have known much earlier, since the GUI gives a message which ends in “…Also check that the system’s hostname resolves properly.”. But I only realised it when I was looking for how to get rid of a warning message that I got whenever running sudo anyCommand. It read
sudo: unable to resolve host myCorrectHostname
Both problems had the same cause. Solved!

eeepc as a linux audio workstation

A few days ago I told you about the first steps into using an eeepc as a real-time audio tool. jack runs up fine. I chose the internal audio card with the combination 48kHz,  256frames, 4buffers (which gives a latency of  21.3msec) and running on its  own  it doesn’t cough up any xrun.

I couldn’t get sooperlooper working yet. Sooperlooper works (see solution)! freqtweak works  (A nice little thing!), too.  Ardour works very nice, too. Sometimes the screen is a bit small for the whole window, but  I was using ardour a bit today and it wasn’t too much of  a hassle. Audacity is buggy (converting to mono + playing results in a segmentation fault).

I will try and find out about sooperlooper and audacity. Other programs and how an external audio card  connects  (I hope  my older posts will tell me what to do), a midi interface and all that will come up soon…